The disclosed concepts relate generally to electronic apparatus. More particularly, the disclosed concepts relate to apparatus having optical functionality, related systems, and associated methods.
Many consumer electronic devices include displays such as liquid crystal displays or light emitting diode displays that implement some type of backlight source. In general, these displays can consume a great amount of power, particularly in the realm of portable devices such as cellular telephones, portable digital assistants, videogames and so forth. In addition, many of these same devices include a reflectance-based proximity sensor.
To reduce power consumption in such devices, attempts are made to provide a detection mechanism to detect ambient light conditions to aid in determining an appropriate amount of illumination to be provided by the display based on an environment in which the display is located. Such a detector can be implemented using a high quality photodetector that is closely matched to a human photopic response. This optical processor can be integrated with a reflectance proximity sensor which can be used in many display applications to support various display and touch sensor inputs, enabling and disabling them as appropriate to reduce power and prevent spurious inputs (such as disabling the touch display when a cell phone is held to the head).